Brian A Stauffer
The University of Texas at Austin, Institute for Historical Studies, Department Member
- Mexican History, Church and State, Catholicism, Popular religion, 19th Century Mexican History, Religiosity, and 12 morePopular/Folk Catholicism, Transnational History, Secularization, Popular Revolt, Anticlericalism, Liberalism, Land reform, Indigenous Communities, US-Mexico Borderlands, Texas History, Colonization, and Religious Conflictedit
- Brian A. Stauffer was born in Afton, Wyoming. He holds a Ph.D. in Latin American History from the University of Texas... moreBrian A. Stauffer was born in Afton, Wyoming. He holds a Ph.D. in Latin American History from the University of Texas at Austin and an M.A. in Latin American History from the University of New Mexico. His research focuses on the religious and agrarian history of Greater Mexico in the nineteenth century, and his book on Michoacán’s so-called “Religionero” rebellion of 1873-1877 is out now with the University of New Mexico Press (2019). His other published work includes a book chapter on the privatization of indigenous communal lands in nineteenth-century Michoacán and an article on Catholic globalization and Mexico’s “spiritual pilgrimage” of 1874. Since July 2016, he has served as the Translator and Curator of the Spanish Collection at the Texas General Land Office.edit
This work reconstructs the history of Mexico’s forgotten “Religionero” rebellion of 1873–1877, an armed Catholic challenge to the government of Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada. An essentially grassroots movement—organized by indigenous,... more
This work reconstructs the history of Mexico’s forgotten “Religionero” rebellion of 1873–1877, an armed Catholic challenge to the government of Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada. An essentially grassroots movement—organized by indigenous, Afro-Mexican, and mestizo parishioners in Mexico’s central-western Catholic heartland—the Religionero rebellion erupted in response to a series of anticlerical measures raised to constitutional status by the Lerdo government. These “Laws of Reform” decreed the full independence of Church and state, secularized marriage and burial practices, prohibited acts of public worship, and severely curtailed the Church’s ability to own and administer property. A comprehensive reconstruction of the revolt and a critical reappraisal of its significance, this book places ordinary Catholics at the center of the story of Mexico’s fragmented nineteenth-century secularization and Catholic revival.
Research Interests: History of Religion, Liberalism, State Formation, Conservatism, Mexico History, and 10 morePopular Culture and Religious Studies, History of Roman Catholicism, Agrarian History, Religion and Popular Culture, Romanization, Michoacán, Michoacan, Anticlericalismo, Popular Revolt, and History of Catholicism
Against the predominant narrative of Catholic decline in Mexican Texas, this article argues that religious ideas—and mostly those belonging to the Catholic tradition—exerted a strong influence on the colonization process and helped shape... more
Against the predominant narrative of Catholic decline in Mexican Texas, this article argues that religious ideas—and mostly those belonging to the Catholic tradition—exerted a strong influence on the colonization process and helped shape northern Mexican federalism more broadly. In fact, for a variety of influential clerics and colonization boosters, the settlement of Texas was as much a religious project as a political or economic one because it offered an opportunity to promote new kinds of religious communities at the edge of the emerging Mexican nation, in dynamic contraposition to, or in creative dialogue with, religious communities in the United States. Religious designs for colonization came from various quarters, including the Franciscan colleges of north-central Mexico, the diocesan hierarchy at Monterrey, and Presbyterian preachers from Arkansas and Kentucky. However, the most influential strain of religious thinking about colonization—and the one examined in this article—belonged to a tradition of enlightened Catholicism that found particularly fertile ground in the northeastern borderlands in the early nineteenth century. Deeply suspicious of the Spanish high clergy and its papal allies and desirous to “restore” the Church to a more locally sensitive and even democratic ideal that its proponents located in ancient Christianity, this enlightened, “federalist” Catholicism inflected discussions about the frontier and shaped early proposals for the colonization of Texas.
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Paper presented at the XXXII International Congress of the Latin American Studies Association, Chicago, IL, May 21-24, 2014
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Forthcoming with the University of New Mexico Press
Research Interests: Ancient History, Art, History of Religion, Liberalism, State Formation, and 14 moreConservatism, Mexico History, Popular Culture and Religious Studies, History of Roman Catholicism, Agrarian History, Religion and Popular Culture, Romanization, Michoacán, Michoacan, Anticlericalismo, Heaven, Popular Revolt, History of Catholicism, and Victory
Against the predominant narrative of Catholic decline in Mexican Texas, this article argues that religious ideas—and mostly those belonging to the Catholic tradition—exerted a strong influence on the colonization process and helped shape... more
Against the predominant narrative of Catholic decline in Mexican Texas, this article argues that religious ideas—and mostly those belonging to the Catholic tradition—exerted a strong influence on the colonization process and helped shape northern Mexican federalism more broadly. In fact, for a variety of influential clerics and colonization boosters, the settlement of Texas was as much a religious project as a political or economic one because it offered an opportunity to promote new kinds of religious communities at the edge of the emerging Mexican nation, in dynamic contraposition to, or in creative dialogue with, religious communities in the United States. Religious designs for colonization came from various quarters, including the Franciscan colleges of north-central Mexico, the diocesan hierarchy at Monterrey, and Presbyterian preachers from Arkansas and Kentucky. However, the most influential strain of religious thinking about colonization—and the one examined in this article—belonged to a tradition of enlightened Catholicism that found particularly fertile ground in the northeastern borderlands in the early nineteenth century. Deeply suspicious of the Spanish high clergy and its papal allies and desirous to “restore” the Church to a more locally sensitive and even democratic ideal that its proponents located in ancient Christianity, this enlightened, “federalist” Catholicism inflected discussions about the frontier and shaped early proposals for the colonization of Texas.
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In the fall of 1874, in the midst a particularly severe round of Church-state conflict, Mexico's archbishop, Pelagio Antonio Labastida y Dávalos, introduced a novel weapon in the Catholic Church's struggle against liberal... more
In the fall of 1874, in the midst a particularly severe round of Church-state conflict, Mexico's archbishop, Pelagio Antonio Labastida y Dávalos, introduced a novel weapon in the Catholic Church's struggle against liberal anticlericalism. He had sought and obtained a special dispensation from Pope Pius IX for all Mexicans to participate in a “spiritual pilgrimage,” a month-long exercise of mental travel, prayer, and contemplation that would figuratively transport the faithful out of Mexico's anticlerical milieu and into the purified air of Jerusalem, Rome, and other Old World holy sites, where they would pray for divine intercession on behalf of the embattled Church. The practice had been inaugurated a year earlier by lay Catholics in Bologna, as a response to the prohibition of mass pilgrimages in the flesh in the former Papal States. Labastida y Dávalos felt that spiritual pilgrimage could be especially effective in Mexico, where the anticlerical government of Sebastiá...